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There’s clearly a dark European fairy tale element to Brian Catling’s Earwig , one even that may be indebted to a certain type of surreal East European cinema. There’s a sense that classic tropes have been imaginatively reworked for our times, for a modern audience, with a hint of Kafka and dark heart of war colouring if not directly influencing the narrative. There may indeed be more to the work than it being a delightfully Gothic nightmare, but if there is it’s not laid out in any obvious manner. On the surface the situation described in Earwig at least fits a fairy-tale narrative pattern familiar to one extent or another from Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard; the story featuring a beautiful young girl who is held captive by an ugly cruel tyrant. Will a prince come and save her? Well, although one bold young blackmarket urchin Pedric recognises the situation as that of a “maiden imprisoned by an ogre”, he’s perhaps not the saviour you might be expecting. No...

Creating a new fantasy universe usually involves a fair bit of convention with certain recognisable features that make the introduction into a new world familiar enough. Often what distinguishes one apart from the other is what you do with them. Garth Nix succeeds on both fronts in Angel Mage , taking familiar elements from less obvious places to create a standalone fantasy book that has potential to be an interesting series. Essentially, since the angel fantasy is based on the familiar hierarchy of Seraphim through to Archangels, rather than literally redrawing the map, those provided here indicate that Angel Mage takes place in a kind of alternate version of Western Europe, principally in Sarance (France), Ystara (Spain) with references to Alba (England). It’s the references for the period setting however that really sets Angel Mage up, this being a Sarance in debt to and taking much of its adventure setting from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers . The Three Musketeers as an ...

Sam Hurcom’s debut novel operates in classic UK folk-horror territory, in the countryside, in small villages that have codes of silence, where the natives are superstitious and mistrustful of outsiders, where strange things happen. It’s all a little bit dark and a little bit creepy. What is perhaps different about A Shadow on the Lens is how the folk horror setting blends in a murder-mystery investigation that is going to be particularly difficult to resolve if there is a supernatural element to it and if the investigator can’t trust his own senses. That’s the problem that Thomas Bexley has when he is called upon to look into the murder of a young woman in Dinas Powys, a small village in the Welsh countryside. Thomas is not an inspector as such, but rather works as a photographer in what in 1904 is a new field of forensic investigation. The body of Betsan Tilney has been found mutilated, chained and burned close to the woods by the village. The local authorities are keen to blame Trav...

With simple drawings, a lot of silent frames and not much exposition, Juan Berrio’s graphic novel Seven Places Without You leaves a lot of space for you to consider what Elena is going though as she deals with a break-up with her boyfriend Jorge. There’s not a lot more to the story than this, but inevitably, faced with how Elena is reacting to the situation, you are given to consider how you might behave in a similar situation. Initially, it seems that Elena has little choice but to move on and start to consider the world and the places she visits in a new light as places without Jorge. She actually seems quite passive about the idea, accepting that Jorge essentially seems to have abandoned her, leaving her in an awkward position of living with his parents. Perhaps there’s been more building towards the break-up or perhaps Elena has indeed been too passive, but without any angry words being aired, Elena knows that it’s probably time to get used to life without Jorge. She takes up an o...